HOBTOWN MYSTERY STORIES VOL. 3: The Secret of the Saucer, by Kris Bertin, illustrated by Alexander Forbes
Detective fiction is about getting to the bottom of things; weird fiction is about the abyss in its bottomless depths. “Hobtown Mystery Stories,” in their layered and satisfying surrealism, are about both.
For “The Secret of the Saucer,” their third installment in the gloriously ambiguous series, the writer Kris Bertin and the artist Alexander Forbes subject the unlucky burg of Hobtown to an attack (not exactly) by an alien (sort of) in a flying saucer (more of a pod, really). As a result, the locals victimized in the intrusion can’t quite speak coherently — the right words emerge, but in the wrong order.
Presumably to give us a sense of how disorienting this is, the book is presented backward, starting with Chapter 12 and counting down to the prologue. The climactic showdown happens immediately; the premonitory dream that gives it some small scrap of meaning comes at the book’s end.
Trying to unravel the nature of the disruption is our heroine, Dana Nance. A student at Hobtown’s high school, she is bossy, brilliant, a little bit mean. It’s not entirely clear where healthy curiosity ends and teenage rebellion begins: Her father is mixed up with one of the town’s amusingly numerous malevolent secret societies, the Propeller Club.
Dana, by contrast, is just mixed up. She is recovering from being zapped by an otherworldly creature and makes progressively less sense as the narrative threads loosen and the brain-scrambling trauma of her close encounter manifests.
The young amateur detectives in the Hobtown universe are self-consciously modeled on the pure-hearted heroes of children’s mystery books — there are shades of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and one character is a clear homage to Tom Swift — but the venue is a scrupulously realistic (well, minus the monsters) town in rural Nova Scotia.
The resulting contrast reflects a generational divide that will be familiar to non-Canadians, too: The adults are locked in conflicts that go back generations, and they often try to convince or bully the kids into siding with them. The kids, for their part, are largely all right.
Dana is the most interesting of these. She has dedicated herself to the school’s Junior Detective Club, apparently the only non-clandestine organization in town, and, almost as an afterthought, to her friends, who are mostly in the club to enjoy her brilliance and one another’s hormonal company. She has the same disagreeable intensity and intuitive acumen as Sherlock Holmes, but is constantly thwarted by townspeople who look down on her for her gender, her youth and her wealthy family’s mixed reputation.
And most interestingly, she’s a persistently rational presence in a world where utterly irrational things happen in full view of the public. Dana has managed to remain skeptical because she’s never before had to confront the time-bending forces that menaced her friends in earlier books, but here, she communes directly with some kind of incomprehensible being, and it messes her up.
It also tells her things that seem true: “Mysteries are the world, asking you to take control of it,” she hears the creature say during a long conversation that reads as a psychotic break to everyone around her.
This world will probably always deny Dana the measure of control she so desires. That’s what worlds do. Heartbreak, disease, prejudice, good and bad luck — these forces are as active in Hobtown as they are anywhere, and they’re as capricious as any inter-dimensional monster.
Many a kid who grew up in a small town believes that it is not just a place where some bad people are mixed in with the good, but the seat of genuine evil. That’s how Dana thinks about Hobtown, and because the phenomena she investigates are so strange, we start to think that she may be right. But the truth may be stranger still, and less explicable.
Bertin and Forbes are childhood friends from a little town in the Canadian province of New Brunswick called Lincoln; they have been working on this series since 2010 and releasing it since 2017, and their publisher has announced two more volumes to come. I have grown to admire the skill with which the pair is able to delineate a world that is consistent in utterly weird, dreamlike ways without ever explaining exactly what’s going on.
The imagery is haunting: The grimy “mini-men” who seem to control the townsfolk, the plantlike alien that disguises itself as a balloon, the wide-eyed hilarity on the faces of people who’ve lost their minds — all these are indelible in a way that no explanation could match, and yet they seem to be part of a system. By the end of “The Secret of the Saucer,” we have clues to something deeper and more essential that lies at Hobtown’s foundations, but we don’t quite know what it is yet. Personally, I hope we never find out.
HOBTOWN MYSTERY STORIES VOL. 3: The Secret of the Saucer | By Kris Bertin | Illustrated by Alexander Forbes | Oni Press | 264 pp. | Paperback, $24.99
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